[Illustration:  One of our party climbed to the roof of the dugout and began turning his glasses toward the German lines]

The view from the observation trench on the hill-top, when we finally got there, was a wonderful view, sweeping the whole Champagne battle field.  Hill 208 lay in the distance, still in German hands, and before it, wallowing in the white earth were a number of English tanks abandoned by the French.  Lying out there in No Man’s Land between the trenches, the tanks looked to our Kansas eyes like worn out threshing machines and spelled more clearly than anything else in the landscape the extent of the French failure in the Champagne drive of the spring of 1917.  It may be profitable to know just how far the pendulum of war had swung toward failure in France last spring, before America declared war.  To begin:  The French morale went bad!  We heard here in America that France was bled white.  The French commission told us how sorely France needed the American war declaration.  But to say that the morale of a nation has gone bad means so much.  It is always a struggle even in peace, even in prosperity, for the honest, courageous leadership of a nation to keep any Nation honest.  But when hope begins to sag, when the forces of disorder and darkness that lie subdued and dormant in every nation, and in every human heart are bidden by evil times to rise—­they rise.  Leadership fails in its battle against them.  For a year after the morale of the French began to come back strong, the French newspapers and French government were busy exposing and punishing the creatures who shamed France in the spring of 1917.  German money has been traced to persons high in authority.  A network of German spies was uncovered, working with the mistresses of men high in government—­the kaiser is not above using the thief and the harlot for his aims; money literally by the cartload was poured into certain departments to hinder the work of the army, and the tragic disaster of the Champagne drive was the result partly of intrigue in Paris in the government, partly of poverty, partly the result of three winters of terrible suffering in the nation, and partly the weakening under the strain of all these things, of this “too too solid flesh and blood.”  During the winter of 1916-17 soldiers at the front received letters from home telling of starvation and freezing and sickness in their families.  And trench conditions in the long hard winter were all but unbearable.  When a soldier finally got a leave of absence and started home, he found the railroad system breaking down and he had long waits at junction points with no sleeping quarters, no food, no shelter.  French soldiers going home on leave would lie all night and all day out in the open, drenched by the rain and stained by the mud, and would reach home bringing to their families trench vermin and trench fever and trench misery untold, to add to the woe that the winter had brought to the home while the soldier was away.